Ian Ralston

The Neolithic timber hall at Balbridie, Grampian Region, Scotland: the building, the date, the plant macrofossils

Excavation of a cropmark in northeast Scotland revealed a substantial timber hall of the general form one expects from the early medieval period. Yet it turned out to be Neolithic in date! The structure produced copious quantities of charred cereal grains from contexts intimately associated with its destruction. Accelerator dates confirm the integrity of selected species with the period of use of the building. Hexaploid wheat and cultivated flax were both identified.

The archaeology of Britain : an introduction from the Upper Palaeolithic to the Industrial Revolution

1. British Archaeology since the End of the Second World War 2. The Lateglacial or Late and Final Upper Palaeolithic Colonization of Britain 3. Hunter-Gathers of the Mesolithic 4. The Neolithic Period, c. 4000--2500/2200 BC 5. The Earlier Bronze Age 6. The Later Bronze Age 7. The Iron Age 8. Roman Britain: The Military Dimension 9. Roman Britain: Civil and Rural Society 10 Early Historic Britain 11. The Scandinavian Presence 12. Landscapes of the Middle Ages: Towns 1050--1500 13. Landscapes of the Middle Ages: Churches, Castles and Monasteries 14. Landscapes of the Middles Ages: Rural Settlement and Manors 15. The Historical Geography of Britain from AD 1500: Landscape and Townscape 16. The Workshop of the World: The Industrial Revolution 17. Reeling in the Years: The Past in the Present

Central Gaul at the Roman Conquest: conceptions and misconceptions

Several recent reconstructions of the social and economic development of non-Mediterranean Gaul after c . 200 BC have argued for the development of complex societies, characterized by the appearance of centralized political entities with urban – or at least urbanizing – communities. The emergence of such ‘Archaic States’ is often considered as having been restricted to a broad zone running eastward from the Atlantic facade through the northern Massif Central to the Swiss plateau. Five certain such states are usually claimed: Bituriges cubi, Aedui, Arverni, Sequani, Helvetii; and three probable: Pictones, Lemovices and Lingones. The constitutents of this zone were originally recognized by Dr Daphne Nash (1976; 1978a; 1978b; 1981), and her view has since been adopted in Britain by Champion and his collaborators (1984), Bintliff (1984) and, most recently, Cunliffe (1988: figure 38). Essential to the formulation of this hypothesis was a wide-ranging consideration of three domains of protohistoric evidence on Gaul: literary, most conspicuously Julius Caesar’s de Bello Gallico ; numismatics; and the settlement record of the late La Tene and its more shadowy antecedents. Among more recent commentators, a primary interest in the ‘core–periphery’ relationship (Cunliffe 1988; Rowlands et al. 1987) which existed between the Mediterranean world and Central Gaul is manifest. In a minimal view, this interaction may be envisaged in terms of the consequences of long-distance trade and subsequent military conquest spurring socio-political change. The unspoken by-product of this perspective is that differential development within non-Mediterranean Gaul is simplistically presented in terms of distance-decay from the Mediterranean littoral, with little attention being paid to the effects of physiographic diversity across this landmass.

The Iron Age round-house: later prehistoric building in Britain and beyond

charts, nostalgic ‘remember when archaeology was fun’ photographs, map fragments, collages, sketches, artefacts, ethnographic records, detailed footnotes and much more besides. This is what makes this publication different. It is rigorously academic but brings something new. At the start of the book we are told that this series will have a raw, almost scrapbooklike quality (p. xi). A quick flip to the end of the book confirms that – no index! One reads of new things, encounters surprises and derives some insight into the collective long-term endeavour of fieldwork, spearheaded by Francis Pryor’s ‘first-rate team that argued incessantly and constructively’ (p. 261). Like a scrapbook there are plenty of treasures and ideas to glance at and to return to. The final Chapter 6 would alone justify purchasing the book, as it contains a thought-provoking discussion of the scale of the challenges confronting landscape archaeologists as well as one of the most beguiling sections to appear in any narrative. As the final treat in this scrapbook, we have a disarmingly frank exchange with the three archaeologists who have done most to further landscape archaeology, namely Francis Pryor, Andrew Fleming and Richard Bradley. Each, in open discussion with Chris Evans, looks back at forty years of research – their stories reveal how they themselves have read and returned to re-read landscapes.

Some recent discoveries of ice-wedge cast networks in north-east Scotland

Ice wedges and ice-wedge polygons form as a consequence of soil contraction and cracking at winter temperatures below −15C to −20C (French 1976). Subsequent infilling by sediment results in their preservation as ice-wedge casts. Such casts, frequently used as palaeoclimatic indicators, have been widely recorded in Scotland, principally in the east (Galloway 1961; Sissons 1974), and mainly from exposures in gravel pits. There are few records of the associated ice-wedge polygon networks having been identified in Scotland. To date, networks have been recorded north of the border only in the Aberdeen area (Synge 1956, 1963; Clapperton and Sugden 1977) and in Berwickshire (Greig 1981). They are more abundant in England (e.g. Watson 1977), possibly as a consequence of the more prolonged permafrost conditions there allowing ground-ice cracks to extend and intersect to form polygons (Morgan 1972). The ice-wedge networks from NE Scotland noted here were, with the exception of Longside (Clapperton and Sugden 1977), discovered during a programme of oblique air photography being carried out by Aberdeen Archaeological Surveys with financial support from the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland. Examination of the aerial photography taken in 1982 indicates the presence of ice-wedge cast networks at seven locations (Fig. 1). The dimensions of the polygons (Table 1) are broadly in accord with those of similar structures in present-day permafrost regions. Black (1974) notes that small polygons tend to develop in fine-textured soils, in areas where polygon development has continued for a long time, and where very . . .

Radiocarbon dates for two crannogs on the Isle of Mull, Strathclyde Region, Scotland

Crannogs, the artificial island habitations of the Scottish lochs and lakes, are once more a lively field of research. Following our 1993 report on the crannogs of southwest Scotland and their dates, here is news of crannogs on the Isle of Mull, again with striking dates.

Gordon Childe and Scottish Archaeology: The Edinburgh Years 1927–1946

AbstractThis article considers Childes career in Scotland, where he was Abercromby Professor of Prehistoric Archaeology at Edinburgh University 1927–1946, and assesses his impact on Scottish archaeology and the Scottish archaeological community. Matters discussed include his development of teaching programmes and resources within the university, and his association with the Edinburgh League of Prehistorians. His excavation and fieldwork at Skara Brae and elsewhere, and his publications during this span, are considered. Childes collaborations with the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland and the National Museum, especially during the Second World War, are reviewed. The archaeological achievements of some of his Edinburgh students are briefly summarized.

Social relations in later prehistory: Wessex in the first millennium BC

authors’ research challenges us to go. First we need to scrutinise the concepts that are under discussion (e.g. stratification, class, segmentary society), as part of wider theoretical debates within archaeology. Within that discussion, we should then be explicit about the inferential steps by which such concepts are linked to different lines of archaeological evidence. The establishment of the potential for equal access to agricultural resources does not, in my view, prohibit political and other factors developing historically to produce a society based on unequal relations of production. For these reasons, I look forward to the continuing debate.

Book reviews. Andrew Jones (ed.). Prehistoric Europe: theory and practice (Blackwell Studies in Global Archaeology 12). xvi+378 pages, 93 illustrations, 2 tables. 2008. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell; 978-1-4051-2597-0 hardback £55; 978-1-4051-2596-3 paperback £19.99.

This series is ‘. . . designed to meet the needs of archaeology instructors and students [tackling] . . . key regional and thematic areas of archaeological study’ by producing accessible and ‘useable teaching texts’, which do not sacrifice theoretical sophistication. The volumes should ‘immerse readers in fundamental archaeological ideas and concepts’, but also ‘illuminate more advanced concepts’. . . as well as exposing ‘exciting contemporary developments in the field ’. It is against this demanding schedule that these papers should be judged, the foregoing remarks suggesting senior undergraduates as the primary target readership.

Jon C. Henderson. The Atlantic Iron Age: settlement and identity in the first millennium BC. xiv+370 pages, 125 figures. 2007. Abingdon & New York: Routledge; 978-0-415-43642-7 hardback £60; 978-0-203-93846-1 e-book £60.

I opened The Atlantic Iron Age as an agnostic. Are there traits in Europe’s later prehistory that are quintessentially attributable to proximity to the Western Ocean from Cape Trafalgar to the Butt of Lewis, or characteristic of the ‘bounteous West’? And further, did these endure or at least recur during the longues durées of the preRoman Iron Age? Jon Henderson’s pricy book, the first extended case for the prosecution, develops the theme masterfully introduced by his doctoral supervisor, Barry Cunliffe, in Facing the Ocean.